 Article Writing & Marketing Insights |
27 Percent Entered in 10K Run
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(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)
27% of the EzineArticles behind-the-scenes Team have signed up to run the Bellin Run, a local 10K competitive run with 10,000 other people on June 9th.
Here’s a copy of an internal memo that was sent to the team this morning as part of a training series:
 Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 31, 2007 at 7:45 am | Views 388 | Comments (4) |
Writers vs. Marketers - Who Should Win?
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(18 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)
There’s a competitive online war going on in your niche and there is a good chance that you may not even be aware that it’s happening.
The savvy marketer’s may have already written you off as an inconsequential competitor…
Imagine two entrepreneurs… one is the technician and one is the marketer. Assuming a quality product or service, which one do you think will be doing better in (5) years from now? In most cases, the marketer will be doing better because he or she is focused or obsessed with identifying wants and needs of a very defined ideal-client. They make sure that their products & services are continually promoted as the solution to those needs & desires.
The technician, like the ‘writer,’ is focused or obsessed with delivering a quality product or service first and marketing second. Sometimes their attitude is: If I build a better mousetrap, the world will beat down my doors to find me.
If you want to really thrive online, you must understand the war that the marketers have waged and are planning to continue waging in your niche online. Let’s talk about how this relates to article writing and marketing:
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 30, 2007 at 8:59 am | Views 1,700 | Comments (85) |
Marriage and Wedding Experts
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(7 votes, average: 4.57 out of 5)
EzineArticles Expert Author Shel Taylor told us that from her experience in the marriage field, that our categorization of “Marriage-Wedding” as one single category was wrong. This wasn’t the first time we’ve heard that so we decided to investigate further and here’s what we found:
Of all of the articles in the Marriage-Wedding category, 73% had the words “Marriage or Marry” or “Wedding” in the title… but that didn’t tell us the whole picture, so we drilled further into the 73% and found:
- 85.1% were articles with “Wedding” in the title but not “Marriage or Marry”
- 14.4% were articles with “Marriage or Marry” and not “Wedding”
- .5% were articles with both Wedding and Marriage/Marry in the title
This research showed us that not only was Shel right, but that we should immediately separate the two categories into two new separate and almost unrelated sub-categories.
Today friends, family and fellow expert authors, as we’re gathered together…wait, ;-) We’re proud to announce two new Relationship subcategories: Wedding and Marriage
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 29, 2007 at 10:57 am | Views 485 | Comments (15) |
Convert Article Parts To Stand Alone
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(7 votes, average: 3.57 out of 5)
Let’s talk about article parts (the act of spanning an article across multiple articles to make up a whole article)…
In a non-article-syndication world, article parts makes perfect sense *but* it makes no sense in a distribution model where a reader/user/ezine publisher of your article will have to seriously struggle to pull your article parts together to get the full article (if they are able to at all).
Therefore, when writing articles for individual syndication, consider only writing articles that can stand alone without requiring another to complete the thoughts presented.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 28, 2007 at 6:39 am | Views 758 | Comments (20) |
What Your URL Tells About You
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(9 votes, average: 4.22 out of 5)
The EzineArticles article review team editors are trained to check links that are included with every article submission…and your URL (a fancy term for the website link included in your Resource Box below the article body) tells us a lot about you and the quality or confidence that a reader should have in you and your site.
You gain quality points by: When we determine that you’re a real world expert on the topic you’re writing about because your website continues to offer more products and services that are related to your area of expertise as outlined in your article, bonus points if your related products and services are highly specialized and narrowly defined instead of broadly matched, your website is up, your website is fast, your name and/or face is on your website, you provided multiple ways you can be contacted, your ad to content ratio doesn’t exceed 15% ads, and your website content is largely unique.
You lose quality points by: Having a dead URL (meaning your website doesn’t come up when we check), forcing your visitors to a squeeze page only, having a pure MFA (Made For Adsense) site with no exit clicks other than ads, failing to include a contact us form, failing to identify yourself or the humans who are behind your website, hiding behind a privacy protected whois registration, having multiple unrelated focuses (Example: You’re a ski expert, but there are blackjack ads on your site), having a .info domain, not having your own domain name, your website has broken links or broken images, your website is not indexed yet or banned by the major search engines, you give your first time visitors an instant pop up ad, you failed to properly title each of your webpages, or if you are clearly trying to game the search engines with keyword stuffing or other obvious abuses.
Hope this is helpful to share with you some of what our editors are looking for when they click on your resource box links to check for quality.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 25, 2007 at 7:27 am | Views 696 | Comments (17) |
EzineArticles Blog Transition
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(4 votes, average: 2.75 out of 5)
After a month of planning, this morning we moved the EzineArticles blog from a sub-directory over to a sub-domain.
For a short transition period, we’ve rewritten the old URL’s to the new URL’s so that you shouldn’t have any problems with finding old entries.
Reason for the change is to isolate the blog from the rest of the site and help raise its visibility beyond our existing members so that we can engage in a larger market discussion on the various article writing & marketing issues that impact everyone involved.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 24, 2007 at 11:11 am | Views 371 | Comments (1) |
EzineArticles Ban on Essay and Term Paper Promotion
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(4 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)
In February of this year (Term Papers and Essays For College) we had discussed a preemptive ban by no longer accepting articles from members who have Resource Box links or anchored text links that essentially say, “BUY ESSAYS” or “BUY THIS TERM PAPER” or “BUY TERM PAPERS“.
Earlier this week, we heard that Google would no longer be accepting ads from term paper and essay writing paper mills (See: Google Takes Aim at Online Term Paper Peddlers and No more googling for your college term paper).
Therefore, effective immediately we will no longer be accepting articles that promote essay writing and term paper report selling. In addition, we will invest a couple of weeks of backwards research to cull all existing articles that either promoted an essay-selling term paper service or promoted it as a ‘good idea’.
This is a necessary leadership position to help protect the integrity of our services.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 24, 2007 at 8:43 am | Views 978 | Comments (6) |
Marathons and Article Writing
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(8 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
I did it. This past Sunday, after 7 months of training, I ran my first Marathon (26.2 miles).
It’s a race and there is a winner, but the greater majority of the 6,200 people who ran this Marathon with me had no hopes of actually winning it… but rather they were in it to finish or do their personal best.
It’s a lot like article writing and marketing because it’s a “process” and the true benefits go to those who take a longer term viewpoint rather than only wanting and expecting an immediate return.
If I had to compare completing a marathon to article writing, I’d say that running it is as difficult as writing your first 262 articles… but the lessons you discover along the way about yourself, your niche, your life, your business and the improvement in your writing skills are something that no one can ever take from you. You become stronger for having made the investment of time & energy.
I’m aware that many EzineArticles members have gone on long “article writing marathons” of their own… some who do it individually and others that band together to share the adventure.
The picture on the left is of me at mile 25. I wanted to quit no less than 20 times and they never said it would be easy… But they did say it would be worth it! :-)
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 23, 2007 at 2:03 pm | Views 612 | Comments (15) |
Summary From Authority Authoring Thread
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(6 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)
Due to the high popularity with the (Just an Author or The Authority?) thread, I figured if you’re short on time, you might benefit from a summary of the tips shared:
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 23, 2007 at 9:53 am | Views 532 | Comments (11) |
Josh Dorkin’s Blog Comment
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(4 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)
We were recently publicly tweaked by EzineArticles expert author Josh Dorkin in his blog: Never Accuse Your Customer Without Having All the Facts! AND Don’t Steal People’s Content!
First, an apology to Josh — as accusing him of stealing content was never the intent behind the email he received from Abby, one of our editors. In a high ~90% of the cases that normally trigger this email, it is because the author has submitted PLR content, but this wasn’t one of those cases and it’s our bad for not being more diplomatic.
Second, we do make mistakes, but we are reasonable… especially when the issue is about saving a relationship with an ideal expert author.
To answer Josh’s public blog question about wouldn’t it make sense for us to contact him last year? Yes, that would have been better. Sorry, we didn’t have the labor on our team last year to manage problems or issues that need clarity and more research with the same level of detail we can give them today. We also didn’t have our email ticket tracking system with built-in internal escalation procedures.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 21, 2007 at 10:48 pm | Views 503 | Comments (5) |
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